The Internet has evolved into a ubiquitous network that has inspired many companies to rely upon it as a major resource for doing business. For example, many businesses may utilize the Internet, and similar public networking infrastructures, to manage mission critical applications, access content servers, automate assembly and production lines, and implement complex control systems.
However, many of these businesses often maintain a single link to the public network, and thereby create a potential for a single point of failure, and/or serious network vulnerability. When the link fails, the business and its customers may be left with significant downtime and financial loss. In response, some businesses consider multi-site deployments to address their availability concerns. Unfortunately, small to mid-size businesses quickly discover this option may be cost prohibitive. Multi-site deployments may face the increased technical complexity of hosting distributed applications, but may incur costly expenditures for additional equipment, space, software, and personnel.
Other businesses traditionally have selected to address their network availability issues by installing a secondary physical connection to their site. This approach, known as multi-homing, may employ Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). BGP, which is an inter-domain routing protocol, was designed to enable Internet Protocol (IP) routers to direct packets traversing along the Internet between two points. While BGP is a core technology for routing, implementing multi-homing using BGP can be costly and complex to deploy. Moreover, BGP deployments may result in limited route control, increases in data latencies, and require significant administrative overhead. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations, and others, that the present invention has been made.